If I drop my Athlon II X4 640 (O.C. to 3.75 Ghz) in favour of a Phenom II 965/970 will I notice a difference at all? I want to get my encoding times down in ProShow Producer at HD 1080P resolutions. I've put up for 5-6 months now, but as I make longer shows and videos, encoding time is getting worse. Typically, 10 minutes of video takes 40 minutes to encode. The software can support 16 threads (yikes) so I thought about a Phenom II X6 too, but I'm worried my ageing motherboard might bottleneck one of those CPU's.

Gigabyte's site says my GA-MA790X-UD3P supports all of the Phenom II CPU's right up to the just released 1100T, but I have a sneaky suspicion it runs at reduced HT bandwidth on the 790X chip set, and my DDR2 RAM wont be doing it any favours. I also know all of the i7 CPU's run rings round the Phenom II CPU's in encoding tasks, but would be keen to avoid that costly upgrade path if there are benefits in any AMD Phenom CPU's over the Athlon II X4's?

rcs2k4 wrote:If I drop my Athlon II X4 640 (O.C. to 3.75 Ghz) in favour of a Phenom II 965/970 will I notice a difference at all? I want to get my encoding times down in ProShow Producer at HD 1080P resolutions. I've put up for 5-6 months now, but as I make longer shows and videos, encoding time is getting worse. Typically, 10 minutes of video takes 40 minutes to encode. The software can support 16 threads (yikes) so I thought about a Phenom II X6 too, but I'm worried my ageing motherboard might bottleneck one of those CPU's.

Gigabyte's site says my GA-MA790X-UD3P supports all of the Phenom II CPU's right up to the just released 1100T, but I have a sneaky suspicion it runs at reduced HT bandwidth on the 790X chip set, and my DDR2 RAM wont be doing it any favours. I also know all of the i7 CPU's run rings round the Phenom II CPU's in encoding tasks, but would be keen to avoid that costly upgrade path if there are benefits in any AMD Phenom CPU's over the Athlon II X4's?

In your case (video encoding), you can use the hell out of an X6. The upgrade from an X4 would be well worth it for you. Your motherboard will not hinder you. With 8 gigs of RAM you are just fine in that department as well; DDR3 won't give you much improvement over DDR2, only a few percent. The 1100T would be an awesome purchase for you. It's kind of nice to have the rare privilege to to tell someone that an X6 would be a terrific purchase. An X6 will do you better than most i7 processors when it comes to video.

rcs2k4 wrote:Gigabyte's site says my GA-MA790X-UD3P supports all of the Phenom II CPU's right up to the just released 1100T, but I have a sneaky suspicion it runs at reduced HT bandwidth on the 790X chip set

790X supports HT 3.0, the same as every other 700 and 800 series AMD chipset.

Looking at the way the pricing goes from the 1075T onwards, you don't pay much more for each (slight) speed increase, but there's a big gap between the 1055T and 1075T. Should I chance it on a 1055T and overclock the stuffing out of it to match a 1100T? Can they even OC that far - I'm not sure, as I would imagine these CPU's run hotter than my Athlon II does...

I have had good success with my current Athlon II X4 running a 750Mhz over clock and stable. The RAM is running at close to 1600Mhz from it's original 1333Mhz and seams happy, so no reason why it can't take this abuse with a new processor.

The 1055T supposedly overclocks very well, but looking at the prices you posted, the 1100T looks like a pretty good deal anyway. I don't think you can go wrong either way. If you have the money to spare, the 1100T is probably worth the extra cash - I think it's a BE so you'd have an fully unlocked multiplier to play with if you wanted.

flip-mode wrote:The 1055T supposedly overclocks very well, but looking at the prices you posted, the 1100T looks like a pretty good deal anyway. I don't think you can go wrong either way. If you have the money to spare, the 1100T is probably worth the extra cash - I think it's a BE so you'd have an fully unlocked multiplier to play with if you wanted.

To give you an idea with the overclocking you should expect around to peak at around 4GHz with the 1055T with a terrific overclock. I can't get mine about 3.9 to give you an idea. Supposedly the 1100T, should hit 4+ very, very easily. The 1090T will probably do it as well just not as easily. Whether or not the extra the extra bump in a few hundred MHz will make a difference is ultimately up to you.

To Start Press Any Key'. Where's the ANY key? If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing You know, boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot like a woman. You just have to read the manual and press the right buttons.

that means ME is at hexagon, and subpixel refinement is 7 (RD on all frames), I get ~40fps at around 40-50% CPU utilization. I think it's limited by the input, which in MeGUI is vfw4x264.exe, and Avisynth which is single threaded.

that means ME is at hexagon, and subpixel refinement is 7 (RD on all frames), I get ~40fps at around 40-50% CPU utilization. I think it's limited by the input, which in MeGUI is vfw4x264.exe, and Avisynth which is single threaded.

40%-50%? Yikes...something's up, unless you're stuck in singlethreaded-ville for long periods of time due to the filters used. I get cranky at dips down to 80-83%

BTW, I'm guessing that's the MeGUI provided settings (I don't use MeGUI, so I'm not sure), but if you're using only HEX, merange maxes out at 16 unless you bump up to UMH or higher.

I have some patience, but I'm not one of those people willing to wait a day for an encode - my electric bill is bad enough with this 955BE when I encode regularly - but I typically use something like the following from the command line and get 92-100%, but most of the time, I'm only using FFT3DGPU as a filter, if that*:

* NTSC SD discs that were standards-converted from PAL, or silent movies - or even worse, silent movies that were standards converted (most of them, due to most restoration work on silents getting done in Europe these days) are more involved.

A GPU accelerated denoiser? Sounds interesting.I for one just figured out that I should use BilinearResize for downsizing, not LanczosResize! It also intrinsically denoises the output as a result. So now I get about 80% load, at 64fps with x264 32bit. I don't have Avisynth 64bit, but MeGUI adds some interface between x264 64bit and the avs file called vfw4x264.exe. The CPU usage in the end is the same if not slightly higher, ~80-90% with slightly lower performance, 60-63fps.

Crayon Shin Chan wrote:I for one just figured out that I should use BilinearResize for downsizing, not LanczosResize! It also intrinsically denoises the output as a result. So now I get about 80% load, at 64fps with x264 32bit.

If you can't notice any difference to your eyes (LanczosResize does tends to be sharper, if you like that look), go with it. BicubicResize is also another option for downsizing (and may not be quite as soft as Bilinear, if memory serves).

I don't recall the hit on LanczosResize being THAT big (I use either that or something like Spline36Resize - which would be slower than Lanczos - on 4x3 material), but I don't know what your AviSynth script looks like, and AviSynth filter chains can certainly be strange, unpredictable things if you're doing anything in AviSynth besides decoding the video and sending it off to x264 with nothing in-between.